


the lessons we never learned

by naheka



Category: DCU, Titans (TV 2018)
Genre: F/M, Platonic Sex, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-21 00:57:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20684855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naheka/pseuds/naheka
Summary: “Here’s the thing,” Donna tells him, “and believe me, it’s annoying: you are a shockingly pretty Cinderella Story.”Dick and Donna, and how we got to them being separated in s1.





	the lessons we never learned

**Author's Note:**

  * For [slifer_the_sky_noodle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/slifer_the_sky_noodle/gifts).

> for sli!
> 
> I wanted to write something for Dick and Donna, and also look at how angry dick is in s1, and this is what came of it.
> 
> not beta-ed.

“Here’s the thing,” Donna tells him, “and believe me, it’s annoying: you are a shockingly pretty Cinderella Story.”

Unforgivably, Dick immediately blushes. He coughs, trying to play it off, and goes for a cocky grin. “I’m glad you’re catching up with the rest of us.”

She hits him in the face with his own pillow, hard enough it topples him off the bed and he crashes into the floor on his back with an indignant yelp. She leans over the edge of the mattress to peer down at him. “Don’t be a faker.”

He faux-pouts at her. “I’m delicate, you know. No extra anything in these genes.”

“Try it on someone who hasn’t known you since you were in pixie shorts,” she tells him, but she extends a hand anyway.

He grips her by the wrist, feels the drag of his calluses against her deceivingly soft skin, the seemingly delicate bones and the steel rip of superhuman muscle underneath. He couldn’t budge her like this even if he wanted to--and he doesn’t. Instead he braces, his own muscles standing out in stark relief up his forearm and into his bicep, sees Donna shift as she automatically counterbalances his weight. 

He goes up in a handstand, one handed, the other arm held out in a salute. Toes pointed, back arched, spine straight: a perfect ten if anybody else was watching.

“Loser,” Donna says fondly, and breaks his grip on her wrist. For a fraction of a second, Dick is in free fall--the jump in his belly and the skipped beat of his heart--and then Donna has caught him by the front of his shirt, pulling him sideways so he lands safely, bouncing lightly on the mattress. 

He presses his cheek against the thin cotton of her shirt, the bump of her ribs. “Wanna stay over?”

She smacks a kiss to his cheek. “As tempting as that is--and it is very tempting, Alfred’s cooking is unreal--you know Bruce doesn't like it when we sleepover.”

“Bruce can--”

She slaps a hand over his mouth, eyes slightly distant. 

Barely ten seconds later, Bruce knocks on the bedroom door. “Dick?”

Dick licks Donna’s palm, grinning when she pulls a face at him. “Yeah, what?”

Bruce looks tired when the door opens, but the lines around his eyes are softer than usual, which means he’s been training. He only gets really awfully cranky when he has to be Bruce Wayne for extended periods of time. “Donna,” he greets.

She lifts her chin at him, her face smooth and her tone even. “Mr. Wayne.”

His lips quirk. “You look just like her when you do that.”

Immediately the facade breaks, Donna’s eyes going wide and guileless, her smile puzzled and ditzy. “Do what?”

Dick laughs, slumping back into the pillows stacked against the headboard. “Can she stay over, B? It’s not a school night.”

The beginnings of Bruce’s smile disappear like they’d never been there. He frowns, the new expression fitting his face more easily. “You’re getting a little... old for sleepovers.”

Dick affects his own innocent look. “You can get too old for friends? Is that your excuse?”

Donna snorts, then tries to look like she hadn’t heard.

Bruce’s look sours, but overly so, like he’s exaggerating it. “Hm,” he says shortly, and departs.

“He thought it was funny,” Dick tells Donna. “You can tell by how much he tried to pretend it annoyed him.”

“Everything annoys him,” Donna mutters. “And he shouldn’t need a child to translate his microexpressions.”

“Teenaged,” Dick corrects, disgruntled. “I’m legally an adult.”

She ruffles his hair. “Still in high school, Adult Wonder.”

He swats at her, rolling onto his side to stick his tongue out at her. “Really rubbing it in about already graduating, huh? Show some sympathy.”

“Older,” she sings at him, “smarter, prettier.” She smoothes his hair. “How crazy is this break from the Titans making you?”

“Bruce checked on me,” Dick says, which is an answer in and of itself. He touches his left flank, palm against his shirt. “I’m healed enough, he’s being overbearing again. Control freak.”

“Bruce is absolutely an overbearing control freak,” Donna tells him. “And you turned your ribcage into matchsticks pulling a move you had no business pulling.”

Dick grins rakishly, remembering it. Triple flip off a moving motorcycle on a high rise rooftop, stuck the landing on a passerby helicopter, deployed minor explosives in the same moment. Dr. Light never knew it was coming until the crash, residual injuries aside. Bruce almost turned purple watching the footage back. “It worked, didn’t it?”

“Matchsticks,” Donna reminds him before hopping to her feet. “Bruce and Diana are going out of town this weekend. Way out of town. You can come to mine if they take Alfred with them.”

“The Embassy’s cooking is pretty good,” Dick admits, softening slightly. Then he scowls. “Way out of town, huh?”

“Positively out of this world.”

Dick’s scowl deepens. A mission to space and Bruce still hasn’t told him, is still not telling him things, treating him like a kid, or worse: a tool. Just another thing he can take off his utility belt and put back when he’s served his purpose. His fingers clench, cutting into his palms as he fists his hands against the mattress.

Donna pinches his cheek, jaring him out of his thoughts. “Cheer up, buttercup, our chef’s no British father figure, but he is a minotaur. You can polish your Ancient Greek.”

Dick says nothing, his jaw clenched and teeth grinding.

Donna sighs. “One of your moods again,” she murmurs, and kisses his cheek again, softer this time, a brush of her lips against his skin, the faint scent of her chapstick and her shampoo. “Text me tomorrow so I know you haven’t joined a nunnery and taken a vow of silence.”

“I used to,” Dick says before he can stop himself. It’s always so hard to stop himself around Donna, he always assumes she knows just what he’s thinking and so forgets to hold his hurts close and hidden. “I used to talk a lot.”

Donna is watching him, face inscrutable, eyes quiet. “It comes back,” she tells him. “I promise you that I know it does.”

She leaves with a wave and a pointed look at his phone, lying on the bedside table. He flicks his fingers at her, acknowledging, and rolls onto his back to stare at the ceiling. 

After a good half hour of brooding, Bruce returns. “Dinner?”

Dick shrugs without looking away from the ceiling. “Patrol?”

“You have another week of light exercise before the question can even be considered.”

Dick rolls over, giving Bruce his back. “Then I’m not hungry.”

“Your ill mood is of your own making,” Bruce tells him unsympathetically. “You were reckless, and foolish, and lucky to not suffer permanent--”

“I get it,” Dick snaps. “I got it the first thousand times you said it, too.”

He can’t see Bruce’s face, but he can tell by his voice he’s getting properly angry. “Then why--” he stops himself. “I’m going out of town,” he says after a pause, and it’s that tone that Dick hates more than anything else, that locked down completely emotionless flatness. Dick would take Bruce spitting mad and roaring in his face over complete disinterest, no contest. 

“Wow,” Dick says, matching Bruce’s tone with his own, sneering teenaged contempt and dripping sarcasm. “Incredible. I hope you have an excellent time. Bring me back a souvenir.” 

He hears Bruce breathe deeply, in through his nose and out through his mouth. “Harper hasn’t been over in a while,” he says tightly, “keep it that way. No parties, no guests.” He shuts Dick’s door behind him. 

Dick rolls face first into his pillow and screams.

Alfred appears at nearly midnight to give him a turkey sandwich. Dick considers not answering when he knocks--always the same way, prim and proper and so very British, somehow--but it’s Alfred, not Bruce, and Alfred... is Alfred. He answers.

“Thanks Al,” he mumbles sheepishly, stuffing the first bite into his mouth. He did eat earlier, at lunch, but it’s been the same ever since that first wave of grief passed and his appetite finally returned--he’s ravenous when he goes more than a few hours without fuel, even on a break from heavy physical training. 

“You and Master Bruce are more alike than either of you are willing to admit,” Alfred says, not for the first time. 

Dick shrugs, retreating back onto his bed, sitting cross-legged and taking another big bite. “Are you going with Bruce on his trip?”

Alfred, the image of propriety, lingers in the doorway. “I’ll be leaving the fridge and larder completely stocked, if you care to ingest something nutritionally sufficient while we’re away.”

“I might go to Donna’s,” Dick muses. “Don’t tell B.”

“Only if he asks,” Alfred agrees, because he’s always liked Donna. “I’d rather you be at the Embassy than Starling City.”

Dick laughs, most of his bad mood falling away before he can grab it and hold on. “Last time I was over Ollie said he was thinking about getting a butler. Roy said I oughtta ask you for references.”

Alfred’s face does something complicated and highly British. He sniffs disdainfully. “I will thank you for exercising restraint on that particular endeavor.”

Dick laughs again, mouth open and mid-bite, just to see Alfred’s eyebrow twitch. “Hey,” he says suddenly, picking at his bedspread with his free hand. “You’ll look out for everybody, won’t you? B doesn’t have any sense without me.”

“I will do what I have always done.”

Dick smiles. “Finally pull that stick out of Bruce’s ass?”

“I’m a butler, not a surgeon,” Alfred says, and Dick laughs so hard his ribs hurt.

++

The day after Bruce and Alfred leave, Dick slaps his alarm off, rolls out of bed, and goes on a run around the grounds instead of going to school. The air is crisp, the leaves just starting to turn, and Dick revels in the coolness after the brutal heat of a Gotham summer.

He used to love it, he remembers, when he would bounce into Bruce’s bedroom before the sun rose, or into the kitchen before Alfred had the kettle going. Loved when Bruce groaned, scrubbed his hand through his bedhead, and dragged Dick out to run laps around the old rose gardens. “They were my grandmother’s,” Bruce told him, “but my mother had a black thumb, and my father lost interest. Alfred keeps them blooming, but they’ll never win a prize again.”

Then he ran Dick in circles around them until he could barely stand anymore, that hummingbird energy that vacillated so strongly between manic joy and grief and blackout rage fading into the background and he could think clearly again. Sense memory; for years Dick’s thought of roses when he meditates.

He runs for three hours, until his lungs ache and his legs are trembling and there’s a sharp ache in his ribcage that he can’t shake, but the quiet escapes him. He storms back to the manor, slamming through the kitchen door, and yanks out the plate of breakfast Alfred left warming for him in the oven. It crashes against the far wall in an explosion of porcelain and scrambled eggs, his fingers smarting from the residual heat. 

The mixing bowls clatter when he flings them on the ground, denting with the force of his anger, and he breaks three knobs of the stove with a cast iron skillet in the first hit. He rampages through the kitchen, his pulse throbbing in his temples, the weakness in his muscles from overexertion, the lingering pain in his ribs, the reminders of all his failures. 

He’s exhausted when the haze clears, standing amidst the mess he’s created, and he should feel--regret? He’s broken things, destroyed them. Alfred’s things, things he has good memories attached to. Maybe even things that belonged to Alfred’s family, Bruce’s family. Bruce’s real family.

He walks out, leaving everything shattered behind him, crunching under his feet. He falls asleep with his shoes still on.

++

He wakes up because Donna is sitting on him. He groans, flailing, and she cackles in his ear. “Getting old,” she sing songs at him. “Shoulda heard me when I was coming through the window. What would Batman say?”

Dick stretches out his spine, kicking his legs free of the blanket. “Shouldn’t you be at big kid school or something?”

“College schedule, birdbrain. I only go three days a week.” She slides off his back to sit on the mattress, arching an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t _you_ be at school?”

Dick rolls on his back, propping an arm under his head. “Senioritis.”

“That’s what you get for not finishing that fancy summer school Bruce set up for you. Nineteen and still in high school, poor baby.”

“I did finish it. Technically. I wrote the program that finished it. And it would have worked if he hadn’t checked with the downstairs computer.” Bruce had been _livid_. Dick hums, absently satisfied, then sticks his tongue out at her. “Any idea of what the mission is, anyway?”

Donna shrugs. “Aliens are mad again. The whole trinity gone at once is remarkable, but not uncommon.” She squints at his feet. “Why is there debris embedded in your shoes? And… eggs?”

“Condiment Man is branching out.” Dick kicks his shoes off, sending them sailing into the wall and down onto the floor. “Wanna sneak out to the tower?”

She frowns, then yanks up his shirt, making him yelp. 

“Cold hands!”

“Don’t be a baby.” She runs her palms over his ribs, feeling carefully and gently, and he takes a big breath so she can feel them expand. It hurts a little, but just like a stitch in his side during a jog. He can push through it, and he’s careful nothing shows on his face.

“See? I’m fine.”

“Hm,” she says shortly, then lies down against his side, snuggling close. Dick leans his head against her arm and sighs. 

“I hate it here,” he murmurs, so quiet he can barely hear himself. “I hate the only home I have left and I hate myself for hating it.”

Donna doesn’t say anything, letting the confession sit between them, settle into their bones. “Okay,” she says softly, just when he’s starting to drift off again. “Let’s go.”

++

“The tower would be better,” Dick complains, sliding into a full splits and laying his torso flat on the training mats.

Donna, surveying a selection of bo staves mounted on the far wall, scoffs. “What’s the point of having a billion dollar gym if you and your shortpants circus ward are the only ones who use it?”

“Leotard,” Dick corrects. “And I only switched to pants because _your boyfriend_\--” he dodges the batarang she flings at his face-- “was so distracted by the sight of my bare legs--” He scrunches into a ball, side rolling left, and avoids a second batarang only to be smacked upside the back of his head a second later by Donna’s palm. “Hey! Superspeed is cheating.”

She drags him into a noogie, then throws him across the room, where he does a backflip and a handspring to bleed of the momentum, then two cartwheels just for fun. He catches the staff she tosses him. “To three points?”

“To uncle,” he counter proposes, and she smiles at him, all bared teeth and the sharp gleam in her eyes.

“To auntie,” she decides, and closes on him.

They’ve always been well matched in a spar, Donna reigning her innate strength back just enough that she doesn’t wreck the place and Dick’s experience and training making her sweat even without a meta boost. Before long they’re both breathing quicker, and there’s a dull ache growing in Dick’s ribs that he’d rather die than admit to.

Except it’s Donna, so she drops her guard just as he’s twisting around to counter a particularly nasty footsnare she’d momentarily caught him in with her lasso. He stops the strike inches from her face, her eyes crossing for a second before she refocuses them. 

“Auntie.”

Dick scowls, all the good burn of a good fight bleeding away and leaving him with nothing but the lingering echoes of his anger. “Cheater.”

Donna tilts her head at him. “How do your ribs feel?”

“Bad. I might’ve rebruised--hey!” He lifts his foot away from her lasso, scowling as the golden glow fades away from the rope as the contact with his skin breaks. “That really is cheating.”

“Sure,” Donna agrees, pushing the staff out of her face and leaving the mats in favor of the far wall and the minifridge against it. She tosses him a bottled water before taking one for herself. “But you Bats are always cheating, so it evens out.”

“I’m not a Bat,” Dick snaps, too sharply, and busies himself with drinking the water before she can ask any follow up questions.

“I’m not an Amazon,” Donna points out. “Not by birth, anyway.”

Dick scowls at the bottle in his hand. “What does birth matter? My parents--” he stops himself, takes a shallow breath, sighs. “Can you help me?”

“Yes,” Donna says, after a short pause. “Always.”

She steps close, then closer. Knocks his hand away with a gentle but impatient slap to his wrist when he tries to lift his shirt for her, so he just sighs and drapes it over her shoulder instead, leaning back against the wall and breathing slow and careful while she checks him over. 

“I don’t think you’ve recracked them, or displaced them,” she decides, but doesn’t pull her hand away. “Ice, rest, no more sparring until you’ve had an x-ray.”

Dick pulls a face at her. “You sound like your mother.”

“Diana isn’t my mother,” Donna says, sharply but not unkindly. 

Dick winces. He forgot--just for a second, just like Harvey and his scars and his old friends and his baseball bat, held high and coming down fast and the noise it made when it cracked against the Grayson family colors--he forgot that there’s no hurt that is unique, nothing that you can use to justify your actions that you aren’t using like a poisoned knife on someone else. 

“It’s alright,” Donna murmurs, because she knows him just that well. “I know what you meant.” She’s still touching him, featherlight and achingly soft, the skim of her fingertips across his belly, the points of his hips. 

“Donna,” Dick says, and his voice breaks in the middle. He clears his throat. “I’m starving.”

She smiles, quiet and knowing, and runs her fingers through his damp hair before wiping the sweat off on the collar of his t-shirt. “Shower first?”

“Mm,” Dick agrees. “You can finally ask me the thing you’ve been anxious about all week.”

“Bat,” Donna grumbles, following him into the attached locker room, “bird, airplane in the sky. Cheaters, the lot of you.’

++

“So,” Donna tells him from inside one of the shower stalls. “About all the times I’ve saved your sorry life.”

Dick snorts, standing on one foot while he wrestles his sweatpants off. “What about all the times I’ve saved yours?”

The water cranks on, spraying against the tile, and Donna emerges a second later, her shirt already off in her hand. She drops it into the laundry chute and pokes around one of the cabinets against the wall. “Do you still have--”

“Second drawer on the left.”

Donna pulls out a pair of sweatpants and one of Dick’s t-shirts, a garish orange with dancing clowns across the chest. She stares at it, speechless, then looks up at him.

“It reminds me of the circus.”

When she laughs, her eyes dance, warm and golden. She shoves him ahead of her into the shower. “Boxers off, kiddo, this isn’t summer camp.”

Dick kicks off his underwear, hearing her do the same behind him, and they crowd under the spray, sighing as the heat eases their sore muscles. Dick tips his face forward into the spray, eyes closed, and mumbles appreciatively when Donna slicks his hair out of his eyes, tucking it behind his ears with a friendly scritch of her nails. She’s warm behind him, slick from the water as it rinses her sweat away, and he can feel her exhales on the back of his neck. 

“Can you raise your arms?”

“I can do anything,” Dick mumbles, lulled by the steady movements of her fingers through his hair. “Fight me.”

She giggles, more girlish than she is when they’re not alone, and flicks his earlobe. “C’mon, turn around, I got you.”

He lets her move him, pliant, more quietly at peace with himself than he has been in days, weeks maybe, Donna’s firm protective presence against his back, the warm pleasant press of their skin, her strong fingers massaging suds into his hair. He relaxes, leaning into her, and she holds him up. 

“That favour,” she says, over the spray of the water. “You don’t have to say yes if you don’t want to.”

Dick can’t imagine Donna genuinely asking him anything he wouldn’t be willing to do for her. “Mm?”

“Photography project,” she explains, “for class. I need a model. Lean forward a little.”

He tips his head forward, obedient, and frowns slightly. “That’s what you were nervous about? Of course I will.”

“Not nervous,” she corrects, “unsure, I guess? I asked Roy first, and…” she trails off with a sigh. 

“He didn’t want to do it?” Dick’s frown increases. “That’s--I’m surprised.”

“Not that,” Donna says evasively. “Not that exactly, anyway. It kind of… Started a conversation, I guess.”

Dick straightens, turning to face her. He remembers when she towered over him, but it’s only a few inches between them now, and he doesn’t think he’s done growing yet. His shoulders block the worst of the spray from hitting her face. “And?”

Donna bites her lip. “And then we broke up.”

Dick boggles, then recovers, closing the distance between them and pulling her into a hug. Her arms come up around him, and she tucks her face into his neck. “Dawn says this is called being dumped.”

He tightens his hold on her, nuzzling into her hair and smoothing her spine with his hand, comforting. He remembers the crack he made about Roy during their spar and winces. “Roy’s dumb,” he says, loyalties wavering, “he’ll regret it, he’ll change his mind.”

Donna scoffs, but it’s thick with unshed emotion. “I’m not taking him back.”

Dick grins, releasing her. “Attagirl,” he says, and she matches his smile, wobbly but real. 

“Okay,” she says, “enough mushy shit. Stop hogging the water.”

He pouts. “Conditioning is important, Donna.”

“Then do it yourself, some of us have a lot more hair to get clean.” She squints at him. “Not a lot more, though.”

“Bruce hates it,” Dick says cheerfully, and grins when she rolls her eyes.

They shuffle sideways, turning around in the cramped space, Dick’s back against the wall of the stall and his hand on her hip to steady them both, the thrum of the spar faded but still present and the drag of her body against his. 

Donna looks down at his crotch, then arches an eyebrow. Dick smiles even as he pinks. “Sorry. Automatic response, single guy.”

“Don’t you have a girlfriend?”

Dick laughs. “Yeah, Donna, sure. Girls love guys who never take off their shirts and cancel every date at the last minute and sometimes disappear for days at a time, right?”

“How the hell would I know? I spent puberty on an invisible Greek Island.” She slaps his back playfully. “Go ahead and take care of it, I need to wash Roy Harper out of my hair.”

“_Donna_,” Dick protests, scandalized.

Donna shrugs, shampooing her hair vigorously. “Diana always said this world had hang ups. Go get dressed, then.”

Dick sidles out of the shower stall, refusing to cover himself to prove a point, and shivers at the cold air against his naked body. He towels off, brisk and businesslike, and glares at his erection until it goes away.

++

He’s got the duffel bag in his hand when she emerges from the locker room, hair damp, sweatpants too long in the leg on her, and she shoots it a pointed look. “You’ve got clothes at my place, you know.”

Dick pats the side of the bag. “Not these clothes.” It’s the Robin suit. 

“Ordered rest,” Donna reminds him, and he shrugs.

“The League’s out of town. If something happens, it’s all hands on deck.”

Donna grumbles something that appears to include the words _bats_ and _deathwish_, but Dick ignores her. “Wanna take the bike back?”

“You flew here? Bruce hates that.”

“Bruce isn’t here,” Donna says, with a sly little smile, and isn’t that something, how she can make all his stormclouds fade away. “I’ll even let you drive.”

“Sold.” He leads her up the stairs towards the main entrance. “C’mon, we’ll want to beat the rush.”

She follows him into the entryway, then stops. “Why?”

He blinks. “Uh, because no one enjoys sitting in traffic…?”

“No, Dick, why don’t you want to leave through the back? We always go out the back.”

Dick has an excellent poker face; he knows because he’s spent almost his entire life practicing it, and the majority of his life having Bruce critique it to near perfection. But this is Donna, so she takes a look at him, sighs deeply, and heads for the kitchen.

Dick trails her, quiet, eyes on the floor. He hears her sharp intake of breath when she sees the carnage, and he winces, expecting recriminations, demands to explain _why_ and the helplessness rises in his belly like bile, choking him, because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know why and it’s _eating him alive--_

“I’ll get a broom,” Donna says calmly. “Do you know where the trashbags are?”

Dick exhales. “Yeah,” he says softly. “I know where the trashbags are.”

They clean up the mess without speaking, the only noises the rustling of the bags and the clink of the porcelain shards, the dragging whisper of the broom against the floor. When they’re finished they walk out together, holding hands.

++

If Dick could tell Donna something he’s told her before one more time again, it would be that she saved his life.

If Dick could tell Donna something he’s never ever told her before, it would be that when she sits behind him on his motorcycle, the first thing he built with his own hands, the only thing besides the suit that bears the name his mother gave him, _Robin_ engraved under the engine where no one can see it but him--when Donna sits behind him with her chin on his shoulder and her arm around his waist, the wind in their hair--he feels like he’s flying.

++

“Okay,” Dick says, practically crawling into Donna’s lap to steal the last dolma out of her hand. “Pictures today or tomorrow?”

“Tonight,” Donna decides, dumping him onto the floor as revenge. “I have an idea.”

Dick stretches like a cat, then raises himself up onto a single hand, feet pointed at the ceiling. “Robin, right? I figured.”

Donna scoffs. “As if. It’d be plastered all over the Gotham rags the morning after I turned it in. No, Dick Grayson is who I need.”

Dick smiles, something soft and warm curling in his chest at her words. “Okay. Dick Grayson it is.” He hesitates. “Are you sure? I have the suit…”

“Didn’t you hear me the first time?” She leans over him, the ceiling light above her head like a halo. Her eyes are dark and there’s a little bit of shine at the corner of her mouth from the grape leaves, the pink tip of her tongue as she licks it away. “You’re a prettyboy, Robin. You always have been.”

“Shockingly pretty,” Dick shoots back, after swallowing harder than he meant to. “Don’t forget my modifiers.”

“Boy Wonder,” she teases, “all grown up.” She tweaks his nose. “How do you feel about nudity?”

“Uh,” Dick says, eyes gone wide. “How… naked?”

She waggles her eyebrows at him. “Do it for the art, _Dickie_.”

Dick imagines Bruce’s face at discovering that he’d posed nude for Donna Troy. “I don’t know if he’d be speechless or start cackling like the Joker.”

Donna wiggles her index finger up and down, like she’s pressing the button on her camera. “The hand that killed the bat, and indirectly too.”

Dick shifts, switching hands without falling out of position. “I--I’m not sure I’m ready for that.”

“No worries,” she assures him, rummaging in her bag. “I meant shirtless, nothing below the belt.”

“Oh,” Dick says casually, “I’d actually be more okay with that than being shirtless.”

Donna stops, staring at him. “What?”

Dick scratches the back of his head sheepishly. “I mean, it’s different when it’s you, or even the other Titans or whatever, but I don’t take my shirt off much otherwise.” He shrugs. “Invites too many questions.”

Understanding dawns across Donna’s face. “Your scars.”

“X-Sports can only x-splain so much, if you know what I mean.”

Donna nods, her head tilted and her eyes distant, thinking. She nods again, sharper and decided, and retrieves her camera from inside her bag. “We’ll make it work. I like a challenge.” She stands, then flicks him in the ankle. “Shall we?”

Dick goes two paces walking on his hands, then drops lightly onto his feet. “After you,” he says, and follows.

++

“I know you like high places,” Donna says, as she’s flying them up to the roof. There’s stairway access to the small patio atop the embassy, Dick knows, but Donna also knows him, and Dick loves to fly. “And Themyscirans love the moon.”

It’s rising over the horizon, big and bright and full, it’s full glow washed out by the lightshine coming off the city, muddying the otherwise clear sky. They land, soft and easy, and Donna snaps a picture just like that, without looking at angles or lighting or anything, blurry and unfocused: Dick’s wry almost-there smile and his wind mussed hair. “For me,” she tells him, when he looks at her questioningly. “Go over there and look pretty, won’t you?”

“Anything for you,” he chirps cheerfully, and tugs his shirt off as he goes, tossing it aside carelessly. He spreads his hands out wide. “Thoughts on poses?” 

Donna steps close, eyes sharp. When she rests her hand on his stomach his skin quivers against her palm, the tip of her thumb just barely dipping into his belly button. He’s cut like a gymnast, only the slightest give of his skin before it turns the rigidity of built muscle, the definition standing out sharply when he holds his breath. She trails her fingers over the bumps of his abdomen, across and up, ghosting gently over his injured ribs and up the center of his chest, the flare of his collarbones. She rests her thumb in the hollow of his throat, his pulse against hers, then puts her fingers on the sharp cut of his jaw, turning it one way and then the other. 

Dick is fighting not to breathe quicker, hoping she doesn’t feel his heart thundering in his chest--she smiles and he smiles back, rueful, because who’s he kidding? He’s a hummingbird against the brilliance of her sun. “It’s okay,” she tells him. “I’ve got you.”

And she does. Hands over him, careful and guiding, adjusting his posture, his arms, the turn of his cheek. The shutter snap clicking of her camera, her quiet praise and the gentle pat to his hair when he’s done something just right.

++

“Look,” Donna says, an indeterminable amount of time later. She’s behind him, chin propped on his shoulder, both of them sitting on the concrete, her camera cradled in front of them both so he can see. She clicks through the pictures, and Dick hums appreciatively. She’s good--she’s always been good--but he didn’t realize how deliberately good she is. All his worst scars, the ones he can’t risk people knowing about--the bullet in his shoulder, the nasty web of tissue from a freeze raygun, the small brand in the shape of a question mark--are artfully and cleverly concealed: by a shadow, by a different part of his body, demurely unfocused as to be unrecognizable.

“You’re incredible,” he says honestly, and turns his head to look at her over his shoulder. Her breath is warm against his cheek and the back of his neck, and her face is very close. He can just barely make out her features in the darkness, the slope of her nose and the cut of her eyes and her smiling mouth. “Donna,” he starts to say, and only gets about halfway through her name before he tips his head forward and kisses her. 

The kiss is warm, and soft, and she tastes like coffee and what they had for dinner and the mint of her chapstick. There’s a fraction of a second where fear strikes him, his belly lurching, but then she presses back, careful and still so soft, the flicker of her tongue against his and the ever so slight tightening of her grip on his shoulder. The kiss breaks; they smile at each other.

“And you,” she tells him, and it’s Donna, his first friend after Haly’s left him all alone in Gotham, the first person his own age he knew that wasn’t related to him, the girl who’s always right, the woman who never lies. “Are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

++

Later, in bed, snuggled up close and the room lit by nothing but the dim glow of their phones charging on the nightstand, Dick nudges her. “Donna?”

“It’s late,” she mumbles back. “What.”

“Thanks.”

She ruffles his hair without opening her eyes, getting just his ear before she adjusts. “Sure thing, Hunk Wonder. Not a bad kisser for someone who doesn’t do the do.”

He snickers, soft and huffing, into the pillow that smells like her shampoo. “It would jeopardize the mission.”

Donna groans. “Shut up, oh my god.”

“I can’t risk--”

“If you stop talking, I’ll have sex with you.”

“_Donna_,” Dick gasps, faux-scandalized, and then dissolves into giggles. He doesn’t stop even when she puts her foot into his back and pushes until he topples off the bed. “The things a wonder girl will do for a good night’s sleep,” he muses, lying on his back on the floor.

His pillow sails over the edge of the mattress to land on his face.

“Donna,” Dick whispers, when the sun has just started to rise outside the windows. “I think I only feel real when I’m Robin.” He breathes, letting the words, finally spoken, settle into the quiet of early morning. “Except when I’m with you.”

++

Bruce comes home on a Thursday, two days after Donna turns in her project. He greets Dick at breakfast by slapping down a file folder atop Dick’s scrambled egg whites and bacon. 

Dick flicks it open to idly glace over the pictures before tossing them aside, the folder stained with ketchup. “Yeah, Bruce, I know about these. I was there.”

“Is this your way of showing responsibility?”

Dick’s hand tightens on his fork. “My last League assessment was glowing, don’t even--”

“Careless,” Bruce says harshly, cutting him off. “Verging on idiocy, I can’t begin to--” he stops himself, nostrils flaring as he breathes deep. 

“Nothing was visible,” Dick says, staring at his plate. “We were careful.”

“Careful?” Bruce asks, his voice rising. “_Careful_? Dick Grayson publicly linked to Donna Troy--”

“Bruce Wayne, publicly linked to Clark Kent--”

“Enough,” Bruce barks, and Dick hates it, he hates how Bruce doesn’t even have to shout to stop him in his tracks, hates that he’s nineteen and still in fucking high school and he _hates_ that he wants Bruce to hit him, just once, just for the excuse to hit Bruce back. He especially hates that Bruce won’t hit him, not like this, not outside the suits. Like Dick Grayson is only worth the trouble when there’s an _R_ on his chest.

“You,” he starts, rising to his feet, fists clenched and his vision a little wobbly at the edges. 

“Master Richard,” Alfred says quietly from the doorway. “Would you come in here, please, and join me?”

Dick blinks. Alfred’s never interrupted one of their fights before, especially when it’s only just gotten started. Even Bruce seems a little confused. “Um,” Dick says, off footed. “Okay.”

He goes over, slow, practically dragging his feet, and something must stand out as odd because Bruce trails him. He makes a noise when he sees the kitchen, and it’s not like Dick isn’t expecting them to find out, because he’d broken things and not bothered to even try to replace them or have them fixed, but he didn’t think it would feel like this. 

They stand in silence for a long moment. “Dick,” Bruce says, and his tone more bewildered than enraged.

“What?” Dick asks, cold and flat and hollow. “It’s not like you can’t afford to fix it.”

++

“Seriously?” Roy asks him. “Didn’t know you had it in you.” He pauses. “No, wait, I’m remembering the time the Joker was scaring the shit out of us and you threw a cream pie at him.”

“I happened to have a cream pie within reach on the day the Joker attacked the tower,” Dick protests. “It was destined.” He sighs, leaning his head back against the roof tiles and adjusting the cellphone pressed to his ear. “Any good action?”

“I wish. It’s been quiet, except Gar thinks Hank is a douche.”

“Hank _is_ a douche.”

“Yeah, but we’re all kind of douches.” Roy hesitates, some light noises coming over the line like he’s ducked into a smaller, quieter space. “Donna told you, right? About us.”

“Yeah,” Dick says carefully. “She told me.”

“I called it, but it was--we both knew--” Roy sighs, then clears his throat. “Anyway, I know how the two of you are, so if you have to hate me for a while in solidarity, I get it.”

“Man,” Dick says. “Shut up already.”

And it’s Roy, who’s known him almost as long as Donna, who knows what he means. “You shut up,” he fires back. “Stop running your mouth so Batman will unground you, and get back to San Francisco. Gotham’s no good for you.”

“Gotham’s alright,” Dick says loyally.

Roy snorts, then sighs again. “Gotham,” he says, and he’s trying to be jokey but there’s too much real worry in his voice, “will be the death of you.”

++

In the circus, no one is a morning person. They don’t open the circus until the evening, and they don’t rehearse on performance days. They don’t share breakfast together because it’s bad luck to eat big the morning of a show, and don’t eat lunch together because they’re preparing for their acts. 

Dick remembers the sweet indulgence of it, sleeping in. He remembers he liked that Bruce wasn’t a morning person either, even before he knew it was because Bruce was only just getting into bed at the hour most normal people were getting out. It reminded him of home.

But Alfred has always been a morning person, so Dick wakes with the sun and creeps down the stairs to the kitchen. It’s a Sunday, and Alfred is making pancakes. “I thought you hated pancakes,” Dick says from the doorway.

Alfred is too used to quiet footed occupants of the house to properly startle, but he does shoot Dick a chiding look, which Dick returns with a mischievous wink. Then the mirth fades away, because half of the stove range is still broken from where Dick smashed it. Alfred notices him watching. “The repairman comes tomorrow.”

Dick rolls a shoulder, frustrated with himself. “I’m sorry. I’ll fix it.”

Alfred just looks at him, calm as anything. “Did it help?”

“What?”

“When you struck the stove. Did it make you feel better?”

Dick stares at the smashed dials, the cracked coils, unblinking, until his eyes hurt. “A little. For a second.”

“Then I am glad,” Alfred says gently, “that something of mine was able to help you when you needed it.”

Dick can’t look at him. His eyes are still burning, and even though he blinks rapidly the feeling doesn’t dissipate. “Okay,” he says hoarsely. “I’m still sorry.”

Alfred beckons him closer. “I accept your apology. As penance, flip these sugary American monstrosities.”

Dick brightens at Alfred’s soured grumble, the way he looks down his nose at the spatula. “I knew you hated them,” he says, taking over at the griddle. He flips one, then sticks his pinky in the batter bowl and licks it clean. “What’s the occasion?”

Alfred stays there, by the stove, watching Dick cook. “Master Bruce’s father made pancakes,” he says, and it stops Dick cold. “On Sundays. They would surprise his mother with them, and all eat together on their bed, watching the news.”

On their last night in a city, Dick’s parents used to let him stay up late enough to watch the sunrise the next morning, lying out in the field where they’d taken the big tent down, looking up at the night sky and counting shooting stars. You can never see the stars in Gotham; if it isn’t the clouds it’s the pollution and if it isn’t either of those then there’s something or other on fire.

“Oh,” he says, and flips the next one just a little more carefully. “I don’t know,” he says suddenly, unsure why he’s saying it. “I don’t know why I did it.”

Gently, Alfred touches his shoulder. “Neither,” he tells Dick, “did Master Bruce.”

++

On the third day of his grounding for the kitchen incident, Victor Zsasz breaks out of Arkham and murders his way through the Narrows like it’s late 19th century White Chapel. When Dick puts the cape on he takes his first deep breath since he kissed Donna, that night under the moon.

He falls asleep in the Batmobile, on the way back, seventeen hours after they’d left. He thinks he was dreaming, something vague and insubstantial, and the next thing he knows he’s been pinned against the inside of the passenger side door, Batman’s hand on the back of his neck and his growl in Dick’s ear and Dick snarls and flails. “Robin!”

Dick stills. Right, he remembers, he’s Robin. “Sorry,” he mutters, as Batman releases him. “I was asleep.”

Batman is looking at him, inscrutable behind the cowl. “You were talking in your sleep.”

“What did I say?”

They pull into the cave, the hidden entrance creaking shut behind them, and Bruce turns the car off. They sit there, listening to the engine ping and pop as it cools. “I don’t know,” Bruce says finally, opening the doors and pulling his cowl off. “You weren’t speaking English.”

Dick is stunned into stillness, blinking through the windshield. He can’t remember the last time he spoke a word of Rom to anyone, although it… it must have been his mother, right? Who else would he speak it with?

++

And on the seventh day of his grounding, Donna came. 

Dick comes home from school to find her sprawled out on his bed, wearing his sunglasses and blowing bubblegum bubbles. His window lies in three pieces on the floor. “To be honest,” he tells her after taking it all in and dropping his bag by the door. “I think he’s basically given us his blessing at this point. Do you have any idea what kind of security is attached to those windows?”

She pops her gum at him, then tips her face down so the sunglasses slide down her nose, revealing her eyes. “If I say the word the two non-human entities that serve as his conscience will take you away, and he knows it.”

Dick laughs. “Yeah, sure. Lemme have some of that.”

“He thinks I joke,” Donna mutters, but she tosses him the pack of Hubba Bubba from her pocket. “Anyway, this is a kidnapping.”

Dick stuffs a fistful of bubblegum into his mouth and starts jawing at it. “No way,” he says, words muffled. “I’m two days and three credits away from being sent out to the Bay for another six months of blessed freedom. No need for dramatics.”

“Bird of my heart,” Donna says, leaning back against his headboard and pushing his sunglasses up her nose again. “There is _always_ a need for dramatics.” He can’t see her eyes, but he can tell she’s looking at him pointedly. “Roy says you drunk texted him.”

Dick scowls. “Thanks a lot, Roy. Major bro code violation.”

“Not to me.” Donna flashes him a smile, girl-next-door innocent and sweeter than apple pie. “I’m exempt from all codes. It’s cos I’m special.” Her smile drops just as fast as she’d pasted it on. “You don’t drink, Dick. What’s going on?”

Dick shrugs, turning so he doesn’t have to look at her while he admits it. “It’s been--it’s been ten years, you know?” 

Donna sucks in a quick breath. “Oh,” she says. 

“Yeah.” Bruce had tried to talk to him about it--in his own way, anyway, which had been via a three hour training session. It’s how Bruce copes, Dick knows, by focusing his mind on every crime in Gotham, by worrying about every alien in the sky, by wearing out his body until he can sleep. But Dick had sat in the middle of his bed, muscles aching, and stared into the darkness and hated Tony Zucco more with every miserable waking second. “I just…”

“You’ve lived longer now,” Donna says gently, “without them than you did with them.”

Dick swallows, cutting his gaze sideways to meet her eyes. “Yes.”

“Yes,” she says softly, and of course, he knows how she ended up with Diana, he knows she understands. “C’mon. I’m taking you out of Gotham.”

She floats, outside his window, until he’s got his jacket on and his hood up, domino mask affixed just in case. Then he takes her hand and steps out into thin air. 

++

“I think,” Donna tells him, during the witching hour when the world is too quiet and time is sticky slow, “I think sometimes that all I am is Wonder Girl, and Donna Troy might as well have died in that fire with her father.”

“I’m the last one,” he whispers to her, when everyone and everything else is asleep. “I’m the last Flying Grayson there ever will be.”

“Not with you,” she murmurs against the back of his neck. “And not when you’re with me.”

“I miss you,” he confesses, “I miss who I am when I’m with you.”

“I want to quit,” she says, her face lit by the glow of her lasso across her wrist. “I want to quit and I want you to come with me.”

“I can’t.” They’re sharing a pillow, facing each other and curled up so close, arms overlapping, legs entwined. She’s wearing his shirt, and her fingers are on his bare chest, above his heart. He tips his head up and she slides her cheek over and they kiss, slow and easy. 

When the kiss breaks they’re smiling. “You taste like bubblegum,” she says. Her hand is on his hip. 

Dick licks his lips, nervous. “I haven’t--you know I’ve never--”

“Shh,” she murmurs. “We’re sleeping tonight.”

“Okay,” he says, and doesn’t dream.

++

He wakes at sunrise, the dawn slow and lingering. In Gotham it’s sudden, the night staying for as long as it can before fleeing before the morning sunlight, but here with Donna the transition is lazy and golden, the light streaming through the window and glowing gently against her skin, the dark tumble of her hair. 

She’s sleeping, curled towards him with her arm still slung across his hip, and he nuzzles into her temple, brushing their cheeks together and chastely kissing the corner of her mouth. She stirs and he starts to ease back but she leans forward, eyes still closed, and kisses him properly, morning breath and all.

“I,” Dick says haltingly. “I’m kind of hung up on Dawn.”

Donna nods, eyes sleepy but sharp. “I don’t want Roy to find out.”

“Okay,” Dick says.

“Okay,” Donna agrees.

Dick knows twenty-seven memory storing techniques, and he uses every single one of them in two hours, but he is only able to grasp fragments at a time, honeysuckle puzzle pieces; the way she feels under his hands, her fingers in his hair, his tongue on her skin. The way she giggles when he nips at her throat and drags his messy teenage patchy stubble on it, the way her breath catches when he hesitantly cups his palm between her legs. 

“Like this,” she murmurs, their fingers intertwined, and she shows him how to touch her. Slow and careful, and he fumbles but she’s patient, and when he slips his finger inside down to the first knuckle their moans match each other.

“Yes,” she breathes, a flush rising in her cheeks when he slides down her body and slots his mouth against her, his nose against the crease of her hip. Dick’s always liked talking, always liked puzzles, always liked chewing gum and pen caps and counting his teeth with the tip of his tongue when Bruce makes him meditate, and none of that comes close to the soft slick heat of her, the taste of her, the eager drag of his tongue and the way she cradles him between her trembling thighs.

She guides him in, their eyes locked, murmuring reassurances, her free hand on his bicep, his body trembling as he braces himself. And just then, it hits him. Not like a lightning bolt, not like a freight train. Like when your ear pops at altitude, the relief of a near miss accident: he remembers. He remembers the last time. It was just before they went on, his father’s hand heavy on his shoulder. His mother leant in close and murmured, in Rom, just for the two of them: _good luck_. That was it, he thinks, closing his eyes and letting the memory bleed away so he can focus on the present, on Donna. He won’t remember it again until he meets a teenage girl in a Detroit police station, but he did, just for a second, remember: the last time he heard his mom speak Rom.

“Donna,” he pants into her neck, hips snapping, sweat prickling on his hairline and the fine shivers wracking him, every nerve lit up and singing, her hand soothing and sure on the small of his back and the other on the back of his head, buried in his hair. “Donna--”

“It’s alright,” she tells him, her own eyes fluttering shut. He can feel her around him, wet and hot and clenching, feel her steady hands and hear her steady heart. “You can fall, Dick. I’ll catch you.”

He falls, twisting and jerking, and she rolls her hips in little circles all the way through it, until he’s soft and slipped out of her, the mess between their bellies and the wet spot on the sheets. 

“Hey,” he says, when they’ve caught their breath and kissed one last time. “If we both get emo again, maybe we can try the lasso.”

Donna opens a single eye to cast him a disbelieving look. “Weren’t you a virgin or something?”

Dick grins, rolling over to prop an arm under his head and look at the ceiling. He feels good, quieted, loved. “I’m a prodigy.”

++

Slade ends the Titans. Donna walks away.

++

Bruce waits, in the doorway, not even attempting to look surprised. “There’s a perfectly good front door to this mansion,” he says. “Just because you and Donna--”

“Don’t say her name,” Dick spits, fists clenched and half-packed bag at his feet. “I’m leaving. You can’t stop me.”

“I stopped trying to stop you a decade ago,” Bruce says, and it nearly takes the wind out of Dick’s sails. But he there’s so much of it, so much and no matter how much he tries to bleed away the well never seems to run dry. “I wish you’d--”

Dick isn’t interested in his wishes. “What did I say, that night in the Batmobile? When I was asleep.”

Bruce is silent for a long moment. “It wasn’t in English.”

“Cut the shit, Bruce, we both know you translated it as soon as I was up the stairs. What did I say?”

“That you were sorry,” Bruce says, his face unreadable. “That you hated what you’d become.”

Dick breathes through his nose. His fingernails cut crescents into his palms, sharp pricks of pain and the faint hint of copper in the air. “I hate what you’ve made me,” he says, and when he looks up Bruce is gone.

++

He stops answering Roy’s calls, ignores Dawn’s emails. He and Donna text sometimes, pictures of what they’re doing, one word confirmations they’re both still kicking. Nothing stays the same forever, Dick tells himself. You lost your entire family, you can lose her too.

He keeps the Robin suit under his bed, locked up tight.

Two weeks after he secures a shitty apartment with three other shitty people in the shitty part of shitty Detroit, a package arrives in the mail along with his acceptance letter to the police academy. A cardboard tube, postmarked Gotham. 

It’s the poster of his family, the happy circus font and the bright cheery colors; his mother and father smiling from the top of the world.

**Author's Note:**

> took a quick break from dcu bb to write this, next i finish dcubb, then my other wips here :)


End file.
